Tag archives for Danderyd University Hospital

Danderyd University Hospital, now also a biogas provider for Stockholm's buses. Photo: Staffan Larsson.

It’s Friday, so here’s a happy story for the weekend that inspires me a lot:
Jan Rapp is a physician at the Danderyd University Hospital in Stockholm. For a long time he had noticed how the leftovers from his patients’ dinners and breakfast always went right into the garbage cans and was burnt together with all the other waste from the hospital. No good, thought Jan Rapp and started his quest to make the hospital separate the organic waste and let it go to biogas production instead.

Jan Rapp. Photo: Ellinor Algin.

– I wanted to do something for the climate. It’s our time’s most crucial issue, and besides I needed something to do when I came home from work, he says in an interview with the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (article in Swedish).

Last winter Jan Rapp finally succeeded in his organic waste-collecting mission and the hospital put up special containers at every ward to about 40 tons of food waste from being burnt every year. Now the system has been copied at two other major hospitals and when all the big hospitals of Stockholm have implemented this, around 500 new tons of organic waste will be collected every year in Stockholm. That equals around 60.000 litres of petrol.
– Isn’t it cool, in twenty days the food that we collect can become biogas for the buses in Stockholm, says Jan Rapp in the interview.

And, he points out, this also saves money for the hospital, since the trash bags that were used earlier cost a few Swedish crowns each. 40.000 kronor (around 4.400 Euro) less a year, to be exact.

So, who says one person’s actions can’t make a difference?
Personally I hope Jan Rapp will continue to need things to do after work. And inspires others to do the same.

Sara Jeswani

… is one of the founders of Sweden’s first climate magazine, Effekt. Seeing the connections between society and nature results in a lot of thoughts about how we live our lives. How are Sweden and its inhabitants setting about the challenges of making our society a more sustainable one? Why is Sweden often rated as one of the world’s most sustainable countries? Do we earn that title? And what have we got left to do?